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Housed at the Democratic National Committee, the sycophantic OFA is doingeverything it can to milk the cult of personality Barack Obama created duringthe 2008 campaign. Is it really political activism—or a massive ego trip?
ORGANIZING for
SOCIALISM by Matthew Vadum
iberals responded with howls
of indignation when Rudy
Giuliani mocked community
organizers at last year’s
Republican National Convention.
The former mayor of New York City
said that Barack Obama “worked as a
community organizer.”
“What?” Giuliani said as he burst out
laughing. Speaking over a boisterous
crowd, he continued, “He worked—I
said—I said—OK, OK. Maybe this is thefirst problem on the resume. He worked
as a community organizer.”
GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah
Palin, former mayor of tiny Wasilla,
Alaska, also got laughs when she belittled
Obama’s work with ACORN and other
radical groups. “I guess a small-town
mayor is sort of like a ‘community
organizer,’ except that you have actual
responsibilities,” Palin quipped.
Conservatives roared approval, but
now the Left is aiming to have the
last laugh.
Conservatives are justifiably suspicious
of Obama-style community organizing,
so it’s no surprise that Organizing
for America (OFA) is the kind of
organization that makes those on the
Right uneasy.
Prior to last year, most Americans had
never heard of community organizing.
But what exactly is community
organizing?In the specific sense the Community
Organizer-in-Chief uses the term, it’s
not about church bake sales, picking up
litter, little leagues or parent-teacher
associations.
Obama-style community organizing
is pure leftist, anti-capitalist agitation.
It’s about that nebulous Marxist
concept of “social justice.” It’s about
making people angry so they push for
change. It artificially creates pressure
for government spending on whatever
project is fashionable in leftist circles
that day.
MAKING SOCIALISM COOL
OFA attempts to make progressive
agitation hip and mainstream.
OFA tries to cross Howard Dean-style
activism with community organizing.
It seeks to improve on the Internet-
based success of Dean’s insurgent 2004
presidential campaign that propelled thethen-unknown governor from a sparsely
populated state to frontrunner at the
beginning of that year’s Democratic
primary season.
OFA, which, as a child of the
president’s 2008 campaign, adapted
its name from Obama for America, is
headed by Mitch Stewart, who was an
official in the Obama campaign. Before
that, he was the coordinated campaign
manager for the Democratic Farm Labor
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Party in Minnesota in 2006, when
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D, won her race.
In 2004, he was field director for Sen.
Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and regional field
director in Iowa for former Sen. John
Edwards, D-N.C., during his presidential
run the same year.
OFA is “more than a spinoff of Mr.
Obama’s presidential campaign—it’s
housed at the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) but is free to let the
Party do the political dirty work, and
it keeps his enthusiastic supporters
engaged, active and primed for his
re-election bid,” according to a recent
Washington Times article.
The White House may not legally use
the 13 million e-mail addresses compiled
during last year’s campaign, so Obama
created OFA so he could continue to
proselytize between elections.
Obama’s 2008 campaign was “the
most technology-savvy political operation
in American history,” writes Jose Antonio Vargas, the Huffington Post’s technology
editor.
Those millions of e-mail addresses
represent “supporters who not just
financially supported Obama’s candidacy
but also collectively clocked hundreds of
hours in volunteer time to help elect him
president: knocking on doors, making
phone calls, spreading the word around
within their own online social networks,”
he wrote.
Obama’s campaign backers didn’t
merely give money, Vargas noted. “They gave money and worked for Obama for
free.”
Dean, who served four years as
DNC chairman after his unsuccessful
presidential bid, said for a long time he
pushed his party to embrace the idea of a
“permanent campaign.”
“We now have one, and you have to
have that in order to win,” Dean said,
adding he’s a “big fan” of OFA.
OFA claims to replicate the work of
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community organizers on a national
scale, which is difficult to do because
community organizing is by definition
local. In theory, it’s supposed to involve
participatory democracy, too. It’s not
supposed to be dictated down to localcommunities from on high by the DNC.
Labor organizer turned Harvard
academic Marshall Ganz, who trained
state organizers for the Obama
campaign, agrees the OFA model is
flawed. “It’s much more an instrument
of mobilizing the bottom to serve the top
than organizing the bottom to participate
in shaping the direction of the top,” he
told the liberal New Republic.
Whatever you want to call OFA’s
activism, it relies heavily on the Internet
and frequently draws upon the successf ulmodel of meet-up activism and point-
and-click fundraising developed by
MoveOn.org. That group, which helps to
keep the Democratic Party tilting to port,
was created in 1998 as an effort to build
grassroots opposition to the Republican
effort to impeach President Clinton.
Today, the campaigns waged by OFA and
MoveOn.org often overlap. Sometimes
similar mass e-mails from both groups
will arrive in members’ e-mail boxes
within minutes of each other.
In the fall, OFA copied a publicity-grabbing formula from MoveOn.org by
creating a contest to produce a 30-
second TV ad arguing for government-
run health care.
One ad entered in the “Health Reform
Video Challenge” shows an overturned
car burning on a highway, a woman
drowning and a raging fire, and asks
the viewer if he would help the people
shown if given the opportunity. Referring
to a bogus study by socialized-medicine
supporters, it displays this text: “You
could save 44,000 Americans each year
who die because they have no health
care. Support a public option.”
Judges for the contest included
Obama campaign manager DavidPlouffe, and actors Rosario Dawson,
Kate Walsh and John Cho. Perhaps Cho,
who played “Harold” in the hit movie
“Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle”
was recommended by Kal Penn, a White
House outreach official who played
alongside him as “Kumar.”
A “project” of the Democratic
National Committee, Organizing for
America’s very name is disconcerting
to conservatives because it evokes
images of the radical left-wing father of
community organizing, Saul Alinsky. A Marxist Machiavelli, Alinsky dedicated
his classic activism manual, “Rules for
Radicals,” to Lucifer, whom he called
the “first radical known to man.” The
purpose of the book was to help activists
take power from the “haves” and
redistribute it to the “have-nots.”
Alinsky, a Chicagoan who elevated
local-level political agitation to an art
form, was a significant influence on
Obama, who, like Alinsky, cut his teeth
organizing in the Windy City. Alinsky
believed in “rubbing raw the sores of discontent.” He prescribed the tactics
and defined the goals of community
organizing. Among his “rules”: “Keep
the pressure on. Never let up” and
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it
and polarize it.”
One OFA program might well have
sprung from the mind of Obama’s
close personal friend Bill Ayers, the
unrepentant terrorist turned education
professor.
OFA recruits college students to “build
support for President Obama’s agenda”
and earn college credit while advocating
for “change,” World Net Daily reported.
“By becoming a National Organizing
Intern, you’ll be part of the grassrootseffort to make the change we fought for
a reality in 2009 and beyond,” said an
OFA notice posted on social-networking
websites. “You’ll learn core organizing
principles that are crucial for any
campaign and play an important role in
building our organization in your state.”
The notice continues: “President
Obama describes his time as a
community organizer by saying: ‘It was
the best education I ever had, because
I learned in those neighborhoods that
when ordinary people come together,they can achieve extraordinary things.’
This is your chance to get that same
education.
“If you’re passionate about making
sure every American has quality
health care, reviving our economy, and
building a clean energy future, don’t
miss this great opportunity. No previous
experience is needed in order to apply.”
SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
Organizing for America exists to
relentlessly press for change.“The advantage of Organizing
for America is that it can be devoted
exclusively to a particular issue,
100 million percent,” said DNC
communications director Brad
Woodhouse.
The New Republic describes OFA as
“an Internet version of the top-down
political machines built by Richard Daley
in Chicago or Boss Tweed in New York.
The difference (other than technology)
These screenshots from ads entered in the OFA “Health Reform Video Challenge” are two of 20 finalists that site visitors can vote on.(YouTube.com)
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was that this new machine would rely on
ideological loyalty, not patronage.”
When Obama received the Nobel
Peace Prize, he blasted out a mass
e-mailing through OFA that served
notice he would use the surprise award to
push his extreme agenda.
After acknowledging he didn’t deserve
the prize, Obama announced he would
nonetheless “accept this award as a call
to action.” He said the prize “has not just
been used to honor specific achievement;
it’s also been used as a means to give
momentum to a set of causes.”
DNC spokesman Hari Sevugan
said the largely unregulated OFA’s
primary purpose was “to advance the
president’s agenda, but when there are
good candidates that can advance a
community and support his agenda, we
work for them.”
OFA pushes the president’s legislative
agenda but has also dabbled in state
politics. In March, it got involved in a
race in New York’s 20th District and,
this fall, it got involved in the Virginia
gubernatorial contest.
Organizing for America has no
independent legal status outside the
DNC. And DNC financial filings suggest
little about its structure and day-to-day
operations. Spending on the project is
not separately accounted for in public
disclosures, so its actual scope is difficult
to determine.OFA likes it that way.
OFA does not seem to have helped
Democrats raise money—at least not
yet— but that doesn’t appear to be one of
the group’s goals. As of Oct. 26, the DNC
raised $61.8 million for the 2010 election
cycle, which is below the $68.8 million
the Republican National Committee
raised in the same period, according to
the Center for Responsive Politics.
As a permanent campaign, OFA is
indistinguishable from the presidential
election campaign that BarackObama ran in 2008. It buttresses
and reinforces everything Obama
does, echoing him, lionizing him and
pushing his legislative agenda.
“We’ve never had a political leader
who has continued their organizing while
in office like this at this scale,” former
Washington director of MoveOn.org Tom
Matzzie said in January.
Some say the group has a cultish
feel to it, a sentiment that has only
grown more widespread since it was
revealed in the summer that the Obama
White House tried to use the National
Endowment for the Arts to generate
art supportive of the president’s policy
objectives.
Of course, every administration is
filled with starry-eyed true believers who
think their president is the best ever, but
there seem to be so many more fanatics
in the Obama administration.
“It’s kind of eerie,” said David
Norcross, chairman of the Republican
National Lawyers Association, of OFA.
“It’s creepy.”
“It’s not a permanent political
apparatus. It’s a permanent personal
apparatus built around one man, meant
to reinforce his cult of personality. It has
precious little to do with Democrats.”
The OFA Web site’s web address
seems to reinforce Norcross’ sentiment:
www.BarackObama.com, which was the
address of the presidential campaign
Web site.
“If I were a Democrat, I would be
concerned about this,” said Norcross.
“With both Bushes, Clinton, Reagan,
it was about the party. This is about
Obama. And what happens after him?
Is this an attempt to put together a
movement very different from the
Democratic Party and to take it over and
to supplant it?”
Whatever it is, most Democrats don’tseem too concerned about it.
An OFA employee told me there’s
never been any intention of making the
group a permanent component of the
Democratic Party. “We haven’t thought it
through that far. The goal right now is to
promote President Obama’s agenda.”
Contradicting Howard Dean, he said
OFA is “not a campaign apparatus; it’s a
continuation of the grassroots effort.” The
group currently has staff in 48 states and
plans to have staff in place in all 50 states
by the end of the year, he said.
A different Democratic source told
the Washington Times that as OFA
was being created some Democratic
officials worried it would attack the more
moderate Democratic lawmakers.
Those concerns were well-founded.
This past summer, OFA marshaled its
considerable resources against fellow
Democrats. The group ran health care ads
in eight Republican-leaning battleground
states in order to press wavering
Democrats to support the Obama health
care nationalization agenda.
ONLINE HEALTH CARE ACTIVISM
The pages of the OFA Web site’s blogs
read like a fawning “fanzine,” complete
with beautiful, large, high-resolution
photos of President Obama and a smiling
First Family. Essentially it’sVanity Fair
in digital form. Some blog posts delve
into substantive policy issues; others
show the president looking commanding,poised and even heroic.
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As tea party mania spread across the
nation in August, OFA decided it needed
to fight back in order to save ObamaCare
from the fate HillaryCare suffered under
President Clinton.
OFA hosted an online forum with
Obama billed as an opportunity to
“update supporters on the fight to
pass real health insurance reform.”
This Internet-based pep rally featured
outgoing Virginia Gov. and current DNC
Chairman Tim Kaine and Rep. Debbie
Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla.
Viewers were advised that, since
June 6, OFA volunteers had organized
massive grassroots support for health
care reform. The group claimed more
than 1.5 million OFA members took
action organizing 11,906 local events and
making 64,912 local congressional office
visits in one week, and bragged that its
members had outnumbered protesters at
town hall meetings.
During the online event, Obama
used typical class-warfare rhetoric and
attacked the previous administration:
“We’re here because you believed that
after an era of selfishness and greed, that
we could reclaim a sense of responsibility
and a sense that we have obligations to
each other not just here in Washington
but all across the country. You believed
that instead of growing inequality,
we could restore a sense of fairness
and balance to our economic life andcreate lasting growth and prosperity.
You believed that at a time of war and
turmoil, we could stand strong against
our enemies, but also stand firmly for
our ideals and reach out to the rest of
the world and describe to them what
America is about and how we can forge
together a world of common interests
and common concerns.”
Around the same time, OFA tried a
similarly hard-edged approach, lashing
out at opponents. The group did a mass
e-mailing to its supporters asking themto call their U.S. senators on Sept. 11,
now known as Patriot Day in honor of
those killed in the terrorist attacks eight
years ago.
The OFA message included this
inflammatory statement: “All 50 States
are coordinating in this—as we fight back
against our own Right-Wing Domestic
Terrorists who are subverting the
American Democratic Process, whipped
to a frenzy by their Fox Propaganda
Network ceaselessly re-seizing power for
their treacherous leaders.”
The Heritage Foundation’s
Rory Cooper was incensed. “Many
Americans took off work and sacrificed
family time this past August to attend
congressional town halls, where they
voiced opposition to a government-run
overhaul of their personal health care
choices,” Cooper wrote.Those town hall participants hand-
painted signs, picked up their children
and drove to their local church or school
gymnasium “for valuable lessons in
community organizing and democracy,”
he wrote. For their civic engagement
“they were called names, labeled as ‘too
organized’ or ‘un-American,’ and likened
to mobs, Nazis and Fascists. And now
President Obama’s team has designated
Sept. 11 as the day to liken conservatives
to al Qaeda terrorists.”
OFA tried to keep up the pressure inthe fall. President Obama used OFA for a
mass fund-raising e-mail barely an hour
after health care legislation won narrow
House approval in November. “The final
Senate bill hasn’t even been released yet,
but the insurance companies are already
pressing hard for a filibuster to bury it,”
Obama wrote.
In what seems to be a case of
psychological projection, the machine
politician from Chicago warned that
the “insider lobbyists and partisan
operatives” are “desperate” after their
“old formula of scare tactics, D.C.
back-scratching and special-interest
money” failed to stop the measure in
the House.
FIGHTING THE ACORN ‘SMEAR’
OFA continues trying to cover up the
connection between President Obamaand the most famous of community
organizing groups, the radical
Association of Community Organizations
for Reform Now (ACORN).
On its “Fight the Smears” Web site, the
campaign last year published a lengthy,
untruthful, unconvincing, purported
refutation of Obama’s history with the
advocacy group. Although anyone with
access to the Internet could have found
proof of Obama’s ties to ACORN in
seconds, as more evidence surfaced,
Obama’s webmasters repeatedly fine-tuned the words on the “ACORN rumor”
page to reflect the rapidly changing
evidentiary environment.
Reflecting the continuing interest
the Left has in obscuring the president’s
history with ACORN, “Fight the Smears”
has been incorporated into OFA’s site.
Interest in Obama’s connection
to ACORN reached a low ebb last
summer, but that was before videos
of the undercover prostitution sting
A volunteer at Democratic National Headquarters sits beside boxes from all 50 states containing
642,000 signed pledges of support for ObamaCare, which were delivered to elected ocials onCapitol Hill according to Organizing for America (OFA) who coordinated the event.(Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)
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December 2009 TOWNHALL 41
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engineered by conservative activists
James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles
surfaced on the “Glenn Beck Program”
and on BigGovernment.com.
The videos shocked Americans and led
the IRS and Census Bureau to sever ties
with ACORN.
During the 2008 campaign, as
ACORN voter-registration issues
flared up, Team Obama was desperate
to distance itself from the candidate’s
previous employment with ACORN
affiliate Project Vote.
Obama’s ties to ACORN go back to
at least 1992 when he directed voter
registration efforts for Project Vote. The
push helped elect Sen. Carol Moseley
Braun, D-Ill., who went on to be plagued
by serious corruption allegations
throughout her single term in the Senate.
Obama also helped train ACORN leaders
and represented ACORN in court.
The campaign got lucky when mostof the media—led by the agenda-setting
New York Times—responded with a
deafening silence to news of Obama’s
involvement with America’s most
infamous activist network.
During the election cycle, it was already
known that, at an ACORN-sponsored forum
in late 2007, Obama vowed he would meet
with ACORN and other members of the
radical advocacy community in his first 100
days as U.S. president. He said: “Before I
even get inaugurated, during the transition,
we’re going to be calling all of you in to
help us shape the agenda. We’re going to
be having meetings all across the country
with community organizations so that you
have input into the agenda for the next
presidency of the United States of America.”
The month before, Obama said: “I’ve
been fighting alongside ACORN on issues
you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I
ran Project Vote voter registration drives
in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the
middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”
And during the primaries, the late
blogger Nancy Armstrong discovered
the campaign paid $832,598 to Citizens
Services Inc., an ACORN affiliate, for get-
out-the-vote activities. The expenditures
were originally listed in campaign finance
filings as “staging, sound and lighting,”
but when the campaign was caught
lying, it quickly issued a “correction”acknowledging the money went to get-out-
the-vote efforts during primary season.
Although the media had been
interested, albeit briefly, in the Rev.
Jeremiah Wright, the preacher whose
fiery anti-American sermons Obama
willfully attended for decades, reporters
showed little interest in investigating
the candidate’s ties to ACORN. Despite
ACORN’s track record for crime
and corruption, journalists offered a
collective yawn about the group.
But candidate Obama decided to take
no chances and went all out in an effort
to deny his association with ACORN.
The campaign went to the political
equivalent of DEFCON-1, treating the
entirely factual accusation that Obama
had worked for the politically radioactive
ACORN as blasphemy.
That effort went into high gear beginning
in September 2008 when ACORN began to
receive a mountain of bad publicity relating
to nationwide allegations of election fraud.
Obama supporters tried to confuse the issue
by saying the senator was never an ACORN
community organizer. They argued that
Project Vote, the voter registration drive
that Obama ran in 1992, was never a part
of ACORN.
Aided by the liberal Huffington Post
and its George Soros-backed allies at
the propaganda factory Media Matters
for America, Project Vote engaged in
legalistic hairsplitting, conveniently
claiming it didn’t become closely
aligned with ACORN until Obama left.
Incredibly, reporters generally took
Project Vote at its word.
They shouldn’t have. ACORN is well
known for its never-ending reliance on
of the “plausible deniability” argument.
Its unusual mafia-like organizational
structure allows it to take credit when
a member of the ACORN family
does something commendable andto distance itself when the affiliate
runs into trouble or when the political
environment requires it. Organizing for
America seems to have stayed out of
legal trouble—so far.
OFA used e-mail to urge its members
to call voters in New York’s 23rd District
in November to remind them to vote.
Members were asked to click on a link to
an “online tool” that showed the names
and telephone numbers of 25 voters and
offered a script for the call.
The Washington Examiner ’s MarkHemingway criticized the “careless” get-
out-the-vote operation, arguing it opened
the door to spammers and criminals
whom OFA would have difficulty
tracking down after the fact. “By the end
of the process, total strangers with the
imprimatur of calling on behalf of an
organization founded by the president
will be privy to the name, phone number,
e-mail, age and gender of 25 voters in
New York,” he wrote.
Barbara Malatesta, foreground, reads some health care reform literature as she and others wait for
the start of a training session regarding health care reform given by Organizing for America, to dispelcommon “myths” surrounding ObamaCare.(AP/Tina Fineberg)
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CRITICISM
David Wasserman of the Cook
Political Report said he didn’t share
the view of some that OFA is a
political operation unprecedented
in American politics. “The operation
is essentially designed to keep
Democratic enthusiasm percolating
while Obama tries to rise above the
fray to pass an agenda,” Wasserman
told me. “I think what’s historic is that
Obama compiled 13 million e-mail
addresses. Bush was able to compile
millions of e-mails as well, and those
e-mail addresses were useful to
Republicans politically.”
And Michael Barone, senior
political analyst at the Washington
Examiner and co-author of the
“Almanac of American Politics,” didn’t
seem impressed by OFA. “What
strikes me as fascinating is the lackof energy and enthusiasm that I
perceive from this group and the vivid
contrast from what you saw in the
Obama campaign in 2008 and the
way that they were able to gin up all
this support, enthusiasm of people
around the country,” Barone said in
an interview.
“They don’t seem to be nearly
matching the spontaneous enthusiasm
of the tea party groups of these angry
people at town hall meetings,” said
Barone.If he’s right, this could bode ill for
Obama’s agenda.
“One blogger recently noted that
[sale of] Obama memorabilia, the
coffee mugs with his picture on
it and tea towels or whatever else
people were selling, is way down
and it strikes me that for many of
his supporters perhaps the great
achievement was installing America’s
first black president, a man who gave
lip service to a lot of left-think and
called it traditional Americana and who removed the ‘evil’ Texan George
W. Bush from the scene,” Barone
noted.
“And having done that, they’re
resting content,” he said. •
Matthew Vadum is a senior editor at
Capital Research Center, a Washington,
D.C. think tank that studies the politics
of philanthropy.
Obama’s Perpetual Campaign
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“In what may have been the first instance of an
American government ocially calling on one group ofAmerican citizens to protest against, ‘get in [the] faces’of and shout down another group of their own country-men, President Obama authorized his campaign arms,the DNC and Organizing for America, to call opponentsof his health overhaul plan a ‘dangerous mob’ and toencourage supporters to counter (violently, if neces-sary) reasonable demonstrations and to put a stop totheir questioning of elected ocials.”
Erick Erickson
Red State
“Organizing for America, Team Obama
& the DNC’s perpetual campaign arm,
is holding a health reform video contest.
They’ve chosen 20 finalists. Continuing
the human stage-prop theme plied by the
White House over the past year ..., many
of the video finalists use children to shill
for ObamaCare ... the next generation of
government entitlement-seekers declaring
‘I deserve health care.’”
Michelle Malkin
MichelleMalkin.com
“It’s interesting to see the president’s
political machine [in a mass e-mail]
calling on his supporters to use their
Constitutional right to free speech when
the White House spent the last week
criticizing others for doing the exact
same thing.... Afer the ‘astroturfing’
rhetoric from the Democrats [about health
care protesters], it’s hard to ignore the
hypocrisy in this mass e-mail.”
Brian Walsh
National Republican
Senatorial Committee